I am not going to make causual prediction for the future. But Swift will gain more and more popularity if its ease-of-use and robustness are proved. As long as it can be used to develop mobile apps on iOS, I do not see any reason why it cannot be cross-platform. I will attempt it by myself later on.:-)

Actually, it's Apple having their own OS that has led to the fast improvements in smartphones the past few years. And it's having one OS for desktops that's lead to the stagnation there. That's well known.

The language itself looks suitably modern (no need to include semicolons, inferred typing, automatic garbage collection). It doesn't appeal Apple wants people to write Swift code apps for other platforms, but that would certainly be possible. I expect someone could write a tool to convern Swift to, say, JavaScript. At a cursory glance, it's more appealing than Objective-C for those committed to writing native iOS (or OS X) apps.

Apple is about to defy gravity and establish its own proprietary programming language. The success of the iPad and iPhone enable it to do that, but in general, the languages that have gained wide followings of late -- PHP, Ruby, Node.js -- have all been open source code. Will it be free, if not open?

Do you see any potential for Swift to mature into a cross-platform technology? Or is the only thing that's interesting here its connection to native frameworks? Is there anything interesting about the language itself?

That "closed garden" (proprietary) approach does not stifle competition. Rather, it shifts competition to different arenas. Everyone is free to produce better products. If you are an Apple competitor and believe their software development infrastructure is bad, then you should be cheering that they are shooting themselves in the foot. If you think their approach is superior, then you should be looking at ways to innovate in that space for your own benefit.

I, for one, welcome Apple and a few others having the guts to invest and innovate on "software development infrastructure", instead of following the "pussy capitalism" approach that Google, for instance, used when stealing Java for Android.

Good software development infrastructure is not "free" and should not be free. There is a lot of value added in the labor that goes into designing and implementing software developpment infrastructure, e.g.: compilers, interpreters, debuggers, IDEs, etc. Lack of competition in the software development tools arena, partially fostered by a lazy, and "risk-averse" approach of many high-tech corporations, has also had adverse effects on consumers, just not immediately obvious.

I hate the closed garden Apple is always pushing. It limits competition and leads to consumers getting screwed. While I'm no fan of any of the big tech firm's involvement with the NSA and other govenrment organisations, at least Android is open enough to give you a choice of device. If every manufacturer had its own operating system we wouldn't have anywhere near the impressive development we've seen with smartphones over the past few years.

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